The Detective of Northern Oddities (2017)

When I saw the title I thought at first it was about police and legal work in Canada or Alaska. It’s actually about warming and the spread of disease in the Arctic, and I thought it was fascinating. Here are a few excerpts in case anybody is on the fence about reading it:

When a creature mysteriously turns up dead in Alaska-be it a sea otter, polar bear, or humpback whale-veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek gets the call. Her necropsies reveal cause of death and causes for concern as climate change frees up new pathogens and other dangers in a vast, thawing north.

Burek often spends her days cutting up the wildest, largest, smallest, most charismatic, and most ferocious creatures in Alaska, looking for what killed them. She’s been on the job for more than 20 years, self-employed and working with just about every organization that oversees wildlife in Alaska. Until recently, she was the only board-certified anatomic pathologist in a state that’s more than twice the size of Texas. (There’s now one other, at the University of Alaska.) She’s still the only one who regularly heads into the field with her flensing knives and vials, harvesting samples that she’ll later squint at under a microscope.

A lot of research worldwide has focused on how climate change will increase disease transmission in tropical and even temperate climates, as with dengue fever in the American South. Far less attention has been paid to what will happen-indeed, is already happening-in the world’s highest latitudes, and to the people who live there. Put another way: The north isn’t just warming. It has a fever.

This matters to you and me even if we live thousands of miles away, because what happens in the north won’t stay there. Birds migrate. Disease spreads. The changes in Alaska are harbingers for what humans and animals may see elsewhere. It’s the front line in climate change’s transformation of the planet.

Addressing a visitor to a necropsy who found the experience challenging: “The only shame is if you pass out where we can’t find you.”